Festival dell'economia 2021/01/28 - Stephanie Kelton ENGLISH

Festival dell'economia 2021/01/28 - Stephanie Kelton ENGLISH

https://youtu.be/sAoSYlrtVAo
2021/01/28
30分
イタリア語版もある so professor kelton we started 10 years ago or so with a financial crisis now we've got a corona virus crisis and in both situations there is a feeling by many people that the outcome wasn't fair that the benefits and costs weren't shared in a fair way how do you imagine what could happen in in the next decade or what should it look like according to your opinion well i mean look you're absolutely right um to have crises come that are of the magnitude right of what we went through a decade ago and have a very um slow and uneven recovery and people felt the unevenness of the 2008 crisis. and here in the u.s and around the world what many people witnessed was a very hasty effort on the part of policymakers to rescue the banks right and the financial system and not to do enough to safeguard and protect the people who were losing their homes and their livelihoods and so forth so you are right that uh we went through this once in the last decade people were rightly i think um you know frustrated and unhappy with the policy response.

and here we are again watching the most vulnerable among us right the people that we refer to as the essential part of our economy essential workers those frontline workers who have borne disproportionately the hardship in the coronavirus pandemic and the job losses and so forth so now the question before us is what will the policy response look like going forward and will we allow as we did before those people who are being most harmed by the economic fallout attached to coronavirus to um to bear that hardship for years to come to lose their jobs to lose their businesses to lose their homes and to suffer for years ahead or or will we choose a different policy response will we say no to this so-called k-shaped recovery that we have been talking about here in the u.s you know we started to see the labor market recover somewhat and through the summer we started to get signs that things were looking pretty okay especially for people in the upper income categories those that were able to work from home those who didn't really suffer any kind of economic losses um but the other leg of the k of course is you know all of the people who whose incomes were um taking a very hard hit and so a bifurcated uneven k-shaped recovery is not good enough we need a recovery that's inclusive we need protections and safeguards we need to restore jobs good paying jobs you know what happened after the 2008 crisis was that over a very long period of time we clawed back the jobs but the jobs that came back were almost always inferior to the jobs that were lost they were lower paying lower hour jobs so the challenge before us is to pick up the pieces that have fallen apart and to put them back better than they were assembled before to build a more resilient economy to put in place those protections and safeguards that will help the most vulnerable in society avoid the kind of long-term damage that was done to them in the last downturn if we step back to the subprime crisis we saw that the banks the commercial banks played a central role and even today the they are center for all the credit system and the feeling is that a lot of this credit is not flowing into the real economy in investment in uh in factories and so on but it's used to buy other financial assets so in your opinion what happened in those 10 years the regulation taken to avoid a new crisis was effective or did we miss something i mean we missed a lot of things and then we chipped away at some of the regulations that were put in place at least here in the us um in terms of things like dodd-frank legislation so we began to chip away at some of those financial regulations that were put in place in the wake of the financial crisis but look what does it take to make a business choose to invest in the company right to pay higher wages to invest in r d to build out you know more infrastructure and so forth versus share buybacks and mergers and acquisition and so forth businesses have to have the confidence that investing in the company you know to grow to be able to produce more of the goods and services that that firm produces that the demand is going to be there.

on the other side in other words they have to believe that those investments are going to return a sufficient profit to make it worthwhile for them using their cash in that way and and the simplest way to say it is businesses hire and invest when they're swamped with customers okay and to the extent that the last recovery that we had was you know fairly anemic for a long period of time it wasn't as if it was a very strong recovery where wages were increasing and consumers were out there um you know being very good customers and and businesses were compelled because they were so swamped with demand to invest more in their companies to produce more output and so forth the demand was weak but fairly stable over the years and so you know businesses are able to extract enormous profits and in part that has to do with the fact that wages did not increase so more of the uh profit more of the revenues go to profits as opposed to worker wages but there are a whole range of ways in which companies extract profits and um and you know legislatively we have made that easier through trade laws through tax laws through labor laws and so forth so a lot of things need to change frankly in order i think to get businesses to orient or reorient their profits back into companies well you're one of the most prominent economies that are pushing or supporting a modern monetary theory could you give us a short explanation of what mmt is about sure so i guess the the place to start with mmt is to say that mmt explains how a sovereign currency works so we don't want to get trapped in bad thinking we don't want broken thinking as the foundation for the policy debates that we have so in other words we want to recognize that governments that operate with a sovereign currency and let me define that um are not constrained financially in the way that households businesses or state local governments or provinces are so what does it mean to have a sovereign currency it means that the government is the issuer of the currency that the currency is not tethered to something that you can run out of it's not convertible into gold or into some other countries currency it's not a fixed exchange rate regime it's what we call a floating exchange rate fiat currency and governments that run that kind of a monetary system have their own central bank that is able to control interest rates that avoids borrowing in foreign currency has policy space available to it to ensure that the economy can recover quickly that you can get back to full employment that the government can afford to purchase whatever is available and for sale in its own unique currency most importantly that means all idle labor which means that we can restore full employment very quickly in countries that have the right kind of flexibility in their monetary systems you made a proposal that includes a a job guarantee by the government you mentioned it before but how does that work i mean already today u.s gdp is growing thanks to public spending and public adapt how does that work well so the economy runs on spending you mentioned gdp and let's remember that this thing we call gdp is sort of like how we talk about the economy because you can't look out and point at something and say oh there's the economy so we point at this number called our gdp but gdp is just a measure of total spending in our economy right it's how much money gets spent every year buying newly produced goods and services so in that total spending number is spending that's driven by households consumer spending spending driven by businesses when they make investments in their factories their plant and equipment and software and r d and that sort of thing it's government spending and it's spending that any other country is doing right the rest of the world might be buying goods and services from you so we have this thing called gdp it's a measure of how much we spend and yes when the private sector spending components get weak when consumers are holding back because of coronavirus when the customers aren't there and businesses scale back because demand is weak government spending can replace some of that lost demand and support the economy and that's what's happening now so you ask about the job guarantee and how that works it's pretty simple the government chooses a wage and benefit package and it says look anyone who wants a job but cannot find one anywhere else in the economy the government will fund that wage and benefit package so the government is financing okay the the wages and benefits of those who work in the program but the program itself the way we envision it is that it's administered as much as possible in a decentralized way so communities local governments are burying primary responsibility for coming up with appropriate jobs that add value to the communities we think that work broadly oriented in in a care economy caring for people caring for the community caring for the planet.

so the government can announce a wage in the u.s context we've said 15 an hour plus benefits the government announces that wage and then pays the wages and benefits of everyone who shows up looking for work in the program that's how it works spontaneously is there a limit about this expense i mean is there a total limit of the depth measured in gdp or or a limit for the yearly expense for such a program no there's there can't be in fact in in order for this to be a true job guarantee you have to take everyone who shows up you can't say you know at some point there's a long line of people coming in for jobs. and you say stop at the ten thousandth person or the hundred thousand person you say you don't you don't get in or the millionth person right we we're all uh we're all out of money we can't afford to hire the rest of you that can't be the case not for a sovereign currency issuing government you can afford to hire everyone who shows up looking for work not able to find it anywhere else in the economy remember if you're the currency issuer you can't run out of money so the limit is in the economy's supply capacity in the ability of the economy to produce the goods and services that those wages will purchase so if you end up hiring let's say 15 million workers and paying them a wage now they have income and they can go out and chase some of those goods and services that are being produced in the economy so what your question really i think is is asking is is there some limit to the economy's productive capacity could you pay people too high a wage if you said instead of 15 an hour we'll pay 30 or 50 an hour would you run the risk of pushing inflationary pressures higher because people would have so much spending power they would go out and try to buy more than the economy can currently produce that is a real possibility and that's why setting the wage and benefit package at the right level where you provide people with decent work at decent wages a living wage good jobs uh that add value to the community at a living wage you can avoid creating the kinds of inflationary pressures that might otherwise result in an economy well nmt does tell the government you've got the power to spend and you bring in the job guarantee but the government could also decide to spend on other things like aircraft carriers and the army i mean mmt doesn't guarantee which kind of politics will be taken no it doesn't uh and look when i say mmt is a description of how the system works and the mechanics of government finance that's exactly what i'm talking about in the 1980s president reagan um you know pushed a defense spending bill and supported that through congress so that we could massively build up the military and we did it he pushed for tax cuts twice big tax cuts that massively increased deficits and added to the public debt and we did it so the point is uh that mmt is giving us a description of how the monetary system works the limits to spending but any congress any future congress any future president any future prime minister around the world could come in and if they've got the right monetary system and the flexibility that it affords it can commit to putting money into a variety of programs it could commit to spending too much there's no protection mmt can't fix the the politics right. we can't come in and uh and say governments are not allowed to spend in this way there are elected officials right they get to make decisions as elected officials the punishment comes at the ballot box if there is an abuse of the power of the purse if voters don't like the fact that governments are using their fiscal power to deliver windfalls to big corporations and the richest people in society with tax cuts that overwhelmingly benefit the people who least need the help in society then they might punish them at the ballot box if they think they're too much uh building up the military or putting resources into other things in depriving health care and education infrastructure of those investments they can uh you know express their dissatisfaction at the ballot box so you know it's the reality is that governments have the capacity to write a budget and fund their priorities whatever those might be going on to the next we already touched this point but now let's go a little bit deeper so we look at the central banks there are kind of lender of loss resource for the governments and if the government choose to finance themselves through the central banks isn't there this risk for the real economy and the real labor market that there is a rise in the in the price level and growing public debt so okay a couple of things here i think that there is confusion about how government finance actually works the mechanics of government finance for sovereign currency issuing governments governments don't have you know it isn't as if there's a choice about how to pay the bills there really is only one way for the government to spend when it authorizes payments and that is to instruct its central bank to carry out the payments that have been authorized by government so in the u.s for example congress has authorized the payment of 2.2 trillion dollars under something called the cares act that was a major piece of legislation that was meant to support incomes and support the economy because of coronavirus the house and the senate just passed another multi-trillion dollar bill the president just signed it and so that legislation is a way for congress to say to its bank the federal reserve get ready because we are ordering up new dollars there's no other way for it to work whenever the government spends the spending is carried out as the central bank credits the appropriate bank accounts and the crediting of those bank accounts gives rise gives birth to newly created currency. and when we pay taxes it's like the death sentence for the dollar so that that those dollars go off to the graveyard when we return them to government so there's constantly new birth of new currency and then the expiration of that currency or the death sentence if you like when we pay our taxes so right now governments are spending more than they are taxing back and that means that net right the government is adding new dollars into the economy so yes there are limits but it doesn't have to do with how the payments are made there's only one way to do it and it doesn't mean that the government could avoid using the central bank it the payments are going to be made via the central bank that's just the way it works if we pay our taxes we don't kill our dollars yeah you do i mean you know it if you like and i'm sort of reluctant to use the analogy but i'll use it because maybe it's helpful you know we are in the digital era right people talk about governments printing money and on television you'll often see the image of the printing press and these new bills rolling off the printing press and people get wide-eyed and they think the government is printing all of this money to make its payments no it's not well it's not doing it that way right it's not rolling off new bills from the printing press what happens is what i just explained the government's fiscal agent the central bank is using a computer keyboard to make the entries into people's bank accounts so that if congress wants to send people two thousand dollars to help support their incomes then a digital entry is made and your bank account increases by two thousand dollars where did that money come from well if you want to think of it as hitting the print key on the computer keyboard you can but when i pay my taxes and i write that check to the government and i send that that check off that check goes through a clearing process and what happens is somebody's hitting what amounts to the delete key those dollars are being taken out of the financial system out of the out of my bank account out of my bank's reserve account at the central bank and so those dollars are deleted away so you just have a constant you know addition and subtraction as governments tax and spend um but it's it's just the way things work i know it feels a little bit funny because we're so used to hearing that our taxes are paying the government's bills so it feels strange to think of the tax as just sort of disappearing once uh the payment is made but the reality is that it's more accurate to think of it as as printing and deleting dollars than it is to think of the government as using our dollars and recycling them into new spending well you made your point clear on this financing part about about the price level part is i mean we we heard for many many years about be careful inflation is coming inflation could come and if we start with a government that can spend at free will doesn't this affect the price level well look okay we should start with the government can spend at free will because that's the truth and we should tell the truth to people about you know the limits to government finance um what are the constraints and as i said in the very beginning the limit is what is available and for sale in the government's own currency that is the upper limit okay that's the reality that is not the same as saying that the government should go out and buy everything that is priced and available for sale in its currency. that's not what i'm saying i'm saying it can afford to buy whatever is available and for sale in its own currency including all idle labor which means it can create full employment it means that unemployment is always a policy choice so look the the government has to share spending space with everyone else who wants to spend into the economy right i want to spend into the economy my parents want to spend my sister wants to spend my neighbor wants to spend we all want to occupy some of the capacity of our economy to produce goods and services government wants to spend into the economy businesses want to spend foreigners want to spend there's only so much capacity to produce to satisfy everyone who wants some piece of the economy right to buy some goods and services so when you say um couldn't the government push things too far absolutely right now we're having a big fight in the u.s about direct checks sent from the federal government to most americans okay and the debate is should it be a six hundred dollar check or should it be a two thousand 000 check and this is the debate that is happening right now on the you know in the uh halls of congress so the question the right question is well is 2000 too risky if you send everyone or nearly everyone two thousand dollars does that give them too much purchasing power that they would run out spend that money and inflation would accelerate to levels that we don't want to see that's the right debate to have i don't know any credible economic uh analyst who has put forward the argument that two thousand dollar payments risk overheating the economy and has shown their work and and made that case nobody has done that in fact quite the opposite the economic analyses that have been done suggest that those two thousand dollar payments will support employment help the recovery add to real gdp growth and so the benefits are there and the costs are not there so the question then is why not five thousand why not ten thousand why not a hundred thousand clearly there's a limit why not make everyone a millionaire good idea no probably very bad idea right so there is a limit and the right way to approach this is through rigorous economic analysis to try to get a sense of just how much capacity right slack there is in the economy to safely absorb that new spending so for a lot of people you know those checks are just pure relief they're behind on their rent they're behind on their utilities they owe thousands of dollars you hand them a 2 000 check it goes right to their creditors right for other people they're not behind on their bills but they're barely getting by you hand them two thousand dollars maybe they go out and you know get a haircut that they thought they couldn't afford to get maybe they see a doctor and you know have some uh costs associated with that that they were avoiding because they thought they couldn't do it a dentist visit or something maybe they go out get a new pair of shoes maybe they go out by video game because their kids didn't really enjoy much of a christmas and now they can buy a few presents that's stimulus for those for people who spend that money and some people will just simply save the money right they they it's not relief it's not stimulus they'll just hold on to it so the big debate we're having here is you know how much to spend and uh put into people's pockets and and how will that money be used can we trust politicians to avoid spending over this threshold that brings us inflation i mean they are there to be re-elected uh i mean that's a huge temptation if they have the keyboard to create money you know it's so interesting you you what you say sounds logical right it sounds like wow politicians would always have the inclination to do too much as opposed to too little because they want their constituents to be as well off uh as possible and they want to be rewarded for showering them with you know money or whatever and the reality is that if i look around the world today. i would be hard-pressed to find a country where the government is doing too much in a pandemic with an economic crisis that has economies very very depressed anywhere i look what i see is government doing too little with the power of the purse with fiscal policy spending too little yeah is that the job guarantee is a way to in a sense protect us from governments trying to do too much or too little because because the job guarantee is an automatic stabilizer so what happens is congress or governments are out of the picture once the program is in place then you don't have to rely on your elected officials to vote for more money to support the program if unemployment increases and you have a job guarantee in place then automatically the funding to support those jobs to pay those workers is released and as the economy begins to recover and those workers transition back into private sector jobs the amount of money the government is spending on the job guarantee program automatically shrinks so the deficit is automatically adjusting in response to changing conditions in the real economy gets bigger when the economy is weak it shrinks as the economy recovers and you don't have to wait around for congress to raise taxes to reduce the deficit or cut spending um because it's happening automatically the program is is producing those budgetary uh changes so it's a benefit why are we talking so much about mmt today is just because we forgot about inflation i mean i think that we're talking about mmt more today because mmt has now for about a quarter of a century been emphasizing the important role of fiscal policy uh as opposed to relying so much on central banks on monetary policy to lay the foundation for a sustainable recovery and you know i think central bankers around the world have come to understand that their ability to help the economy recovery is limited and they are now quite openly telling uh governments we need your help we need a fiscal partner if we're going to get a solid recovery underway and so what people are realizing is that that sounds very much like what mmd has always been arguing that the fiscal policy is the more durable reliable powerful policy lever and um so we see governments increasing deficits um and that to a lot of people sounds like you know something that's consistent with mmt well but if i look at the eurozone and the us and japan are we already living in a mmt world yes we have been i mean mmt is not a policy proposal it's a description of how the monetary system works and the mechanics of government finance so mmt was working 25 years ago 20 years ago 10 years ago five years ago it's working now because it's really a description of how the monetary system works how government finance actually works so we're in an mmt world but what we're also doing is we're running economic policy more compatible more consistent with the way that mmt economists. have supported over the years 英語 (自動生成)